Wicracy is a technological
system for use by political parties. The wicracy system
allows all individual party members--i.e., the voters
themselves, not a small set of elite party "insiders"--to
write, debate and ratify their party's political platform.
This user-generated platform is built and modified in
real-time and is constantly changing in light of
up-to-the-moment changes in the voters' positions on
specific issues.

The term "wicracy" is a
portmanteau of the word "wiki" and the ending "-cracy" in
reference to user-generated content sites, such as
Wikipedia,
and political systems, particularly, democracy.

How Does Wicracy
Work?

Wicracy users first propose
"planks"--i.e., one-line policy statements on particular
issues--to be included in their partys platform. Once
a plank has been proposed, other users can review and debate
the merits of the plank. Users can also take a position--yes
or no--on whether the given plank should be included in the
official platform of their party.

When enough users have taken
a position on a given plank, a quorum is reached. Once a
quorum has been reached, if a plan has a high enough
percentage of "yes" positions, the plank is ratified and
becomes adopted as part of the partys political
platform on Wicracy.org.

What Are Some of the
Benefits of Wicracy?

The benefits of a
user-controlled political platform are numerous,
including:

Unprecedented
empowerment of voters. In terms of total individual
empowerment, wicracy raises democracy to a level that has
no precedent in American politics. Just as
Wikipedia
has rendered traditional encyclopedias obsolete and
Facebook
has rendered traditional facebooks obsolete, wicracy
renders traditional political party structure
obsolete.

Instantaneous
accountability--down to the decimal point. One of the
most powerful, unprecedented features made possible by
the wicracy model is called the "representativeness
indicator." By allowing party views to be broken down
issue-by-issue and the strength of these views to be
measured with precision, the degree to which a given
political candidate represents the views of his or her
party can be quantified more accurately and
precisely--down to the decimal point--than ever thought
possible.

Collective
intelligence. One concept that has captured the
public eye recently is that of the power of the group
(lately being called "crowdsourcing").
Wicracy taps this power at a depth that no political
party has previously even approached, drawing upon the
combined information and experience of potentially
millions of users, not just a handful the view of a
handful of elite politicians and lobbyists.

Coalition-building.
In its full-function form, wicracy allows formation of
intra-party coalitions so as to further enhance the power
of the voter-control model.

"We are using the catch
phrase Total Democracy . . . [because]
that is really what wicracy provides: a truly empowered
electorate," explained Nicole Theiss, quality assurance lead
for the Wicracy demonstration project of 2006. For more
information on that project, see the Wicracy
White Paper and
Technical
Disclosure Bulletin.

A demonstration prototype
(available online temporarily in 2006) made national news,
including an article in eWeek
and inclusion in "Super Sites" at Politics
Online.

Where Can I Use
Wicracy?

Only one party is currently
set to offer wicracy to party members, The
Humane Party. Voters
who wish to participate in this cutting edge political
process are encouraged to join The Humane Party and begin
making their views official.